Reverie

The average person takes a lot of things for granted in this
world. They look at the moon shining brightly in the night, nod at
its aesthetic beauty, and move on to other things. The pedantic
scientist does the same, differently: they analyse the mechanism by
which the moon reflects the light of the sun and marvel at its
rigourness, but never really bother to look at the light itself. Both
of these attributes alone are not enough to appreciate the wondrous
universe around us. One has to feel the aesthetic and
live the machination to experience the sublime. And so I
present this exercise in self-indulgence...

I want to be the sun's light reflected off of the moon falling on
the earth. I want to be the moon feeling the sun's light reflected
off of me on to the earth, and I want to feel the same light reflected
off of the earth on me. I want to be the sun sending my light out to
the far corners of solar system, feeling solar flares erupt from me
the same way instances of righteous anger does, and feeling sunspots
the way a dog licks its injuries. I want to send out comets into the
far reaches of space and be the comet that burns itself out before I
touch the sun. I want to be Jupiter experiencing the collision of
comet Shoemaker and I want to be the one perturbing the great giant,
disturbing the tranquility of the galaxy. I want to be the spiral
galaxy that is the milky way and I want to be a lone star on the edge
of the spiral, spinning away until it is time to explode and become a
neutron star. I want to be a grain of matter feeling the immense
pressure of the gravitational collapse, amalgamating with other like
grains until I vanish into the nothingness that is a black hole. I
want to be sucked into a black hole and I want to be the Hawking
radiation that is emitted when I am absorbed by the black hole,
contributing to the entropy of the universe. I want to be the
universe, feeling every star and planetary object all at one instant,
the same way I feel goose bumps on my skin.

I want to be a blade of grass, shining in the sun with dew drops
glittering all over me until the lawnmower man cometh and my
meaningless existence is ended. I want to be the lawnmover scythe
with a single-minded purpose, that of pointlessly showing the
acquiesing blades of grass who the master is. I want to feel the
entrails of freshly cut grass on my blades. I want to be a soulless
butterfly being buffetted about in the winds, without a care in the
world for the state of the children in Rwanda, whose pain and
suffering I want to be all at once. I want to be everyone who is
responsible for the pain and suffering. I want to be a fetus being
born and I want to be the mother giving birth. I want to be sexless,
male, and female, and I want to be homosexual and heterosexual. I
want to be a seahorse carrying impregnated eggs in my pouch and I want
to be the eggs carried by me.

I want to be the notes of music that come out of distortion effects of
my guitar, or the notes of music twisted and turned in every way in
Bach's Crab Canon, striking my eardrum and I want to be my eardrum
feeling the same notes, transmitting them in the form of
electrochemical signals to the brain. I want to be all the neurons
that fire on the signal, leaving a wake of neurotransmitters in my
path, which I want to be, shouting to every other neuron that will
listen to me. I want to be the antigen eliciting a immune response
from the body's defense mechanisms and I want to be the entire
response to the foreign antigen, fastly mutating and evolving to make
sure I destroy the infidel with finality. I want to be the protein
that is transcribing DNA to make the neurotransmitters and the
antibodies, and I want to be the same protein being translated by
RNA. I want to be the alpha carbon bonding with another carbon and a
nitrogen, in an amino acid, and I want to be all the electrons and the
protons and the neutrons holding the carbon atom together, in my
mini-atomic-universe. I want to be the positron searching and finding
an electron that I can collide with. I want to be the electron being
annihilated in a flash of electromagnetic radiation and I want to be
the photon that is emitted. I want to be the wriggly 10-dimensional
infinitely-thin superstring whose existence people spend their lives
debating over and about whom hundredss of equations have been written.
I want to be each and all of those equations.

I want to be Escher's waterfall, following an infinite course and
I want to be the statement that is Gödel's Incompleness Theorem.
I want to be the proof of this very theorem which requires me again to
be a statement. I want to be Plato as he writes his Apology and I want
to be the surface that feels the ink stain soak into me and I want to
be the pen that is weilded by Plato pressing deep into what I am. I
want to be the computer feeling every keystroke I make and I want to
be this message, travelling first through the buffers of my editor,
the system memories, and out on the network, hopping from one machine
to another, being broken up and reassembled, until I appear on your
screen to become the words you are reading. I want to be your eyes
glancing the very words that I am and I want to be you, perceiving
what is read. I want to be the Internet, throbbing and pulsating,
with millions of people using and abusing me.

I want to experience every moment in time, the past, present, and
future, and every moment in space, in the 4-dimensional construct that
is spacetime. I want to feel, and I want to live, but that is not
meant to be for Quantum Chaos has decreed that I be nothing more than
a member of a species, a puny insignificant human one, doomed to spend
their lives trying to frantically come up with ways to lend meaning to
their lives. And so I shake myself out of this reverie...

I wrote this in a 33-minute brainstorming session. A few parts of
it were edited for correctness and clarity. Check out the song I
did based on this reverie. And in response to those who've asked
and those who may be wondering, I was a teetotaler when I wrote this
(and am one today).

Addendum

I want to be the complex dynamic system that is the Universe,
living on the edge of Chaos.